


a helping hand, a change of heart

by expectopatronuts



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Moicy Secret Santa 2017, Moira takes care of Angela, One-Sided Attraction, Possibly Unrequited Love, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 08:06:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/expectopatronuts/pseuds/expectopatronuts
Summary: Angela breaks down. Moira helps her get back up.Something changes between them.





	a helping hand, a change of heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Apetunias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apetunias/gifts).



> Written for the moicy discord secret santa 2017!  
> Prompt: Moira taking care of Angela (e.g. bringing her coffee, forcing her to go to bed, etc.)
> 
> Hover for translation of the German bits if you're on desktop, and check the end notes if you're on mobile. And if you know a way to make HTML hover tags work on mobile, definitely let me know.

They always worked in silence. They had nothing to say to each other, Moira supposed, and it suited her just fine. She liked the silence, broken only by the little sounds of their movement. The rustle of fabric when one of them rolled up their sleeves, the clinking of glass against the table, the beeping of the monitors, every word muttered under their breath; everything was clearly audible in the stillness.

Ziegler’s little groan was no exception. It was a sound that came from the back of her throat and then became a long exhalation through her nose, and made Moira briefly look up from her measurements.

Her back to her, Moira couldn’t see Ziegler’s face, but she could see her left hand gripping the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles were white. If she had been closer, Moira would have been able to see the ridges of the bone against her skin, and if she had been facing her she would have noticed how the blue of her eyes was barely a rim around her dilated pupils.

“You alright, Ziegler?”

“Fine.” A slow intake of breath. “I’m fine.”

Moira set down the pen and pushed the goggles down so they hung around her neck. Ziegler still hadn’t moved, but the tension in her back and the way she leaned on the table for support belied her answer.

“Yeah? Because you look—”

There was no warning. Ziegler bent forwards slightly before her legs failed her, and she crumpled to the ground.

“Shite.”

Moira rushed to her side. Tentatively, she took hold of her arm and pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist. She held her breath as she felt for the right spot, and only breathed out when she felt Ziegler’s pulse under her skin. It was much faster than it should be.

“Shite,” Moira said again. “Athena, I’m going to need a stretcher in 12A.”

“Activating emergency response protocol,” the AI said. “Please remain calm, help will arrive soon.”

Moira looked up briefly. “I’m calm, don’t worry.”

“The changes in your body temperature and elevated heart rate are indications to the contrary,” said the AI.

Clenching her jaw, Moira looked back at Ziegler.

“Just get somebody here,” she ground out. “Before the end of the century, if possible.”

“Help is on the way, Dr O’Deorain,” said Athena. “And, for the record, irritability is a symptom of distress.”

If an AI could manage to sound smug, Moira could have sworn Athena had perfected the technique. She didn’t bother with an answer; instead she brushed a strand of hair from Ziegler’s face carefully.

“I think you misdiagnosed yourself slightly,” she muttered. “This certainly doesn’t look like ‘fine’ to me.”

* * *

For a panicked second after she woke, Angela didn’t recognize her surroundings. Her head throbbed like she had been whacked with Reinhardt’s hammer and it took her much longer than it should have to put together the blindingly white walls and the smell of disinfectant to deduce that she was in the med-bay.

In the med-bay lying on a stretcher, for some reason, instead of in the lab, working on Project Freya, as she should be.

Wasting time, effectively.

Sitting up took much more effort than previously expected. Her body felt much heavier than it had any right to, and her hands shook slightly for some reason.

A glance to the desk and the foot of the bed let her know that there was no patient chart. That meant she probably hadn’t been there very long. More importantly, it meant that whatever had happened hadn’t been serious.

In any case, the point was moot. As head of medical staff, she was perfectly qualified to discharge herself, and discharge herself she would.

She was sitting on the stretcher, gathering the strength to stand up, when the door opened.

“Oh, you’re awake already. Good.”

Of all the people Angela would have expected to come in—Amari; Lacroix; O’Deorain, even—Jack Morrison wasn’t one of them. He looked at her in silence for a second before closing the door behind him with a soft _click_.

“Yes. It was nothing,” Angela said. Her voice sounded weak to her own ears, and she cleared her throat. “I’m perfectly—”

“I need to talk to you.” Angela looked up at him, and he met her eyes steadily. “Tomorrow’s mission is a no-go.”

“What?”

The strike had been in the works for weeks now, the team carefully put together and the information meticulously analysed. Angela couldn’t believe that after all that effort Jack would simply call it off.

“You’re cancelling the Dorado strike?”

Jack shook his head. “No. The mission is still on,” he said. Angela frowned. “But you’re off the team.”

“What _?_ ” she said again. There was a possibility that she hadn’t heard correctly, that her foggy head hadn’t processed his words properly. But when she looked at him, he was as serious as she had ever seen him. “ _Why?_ ” she asked then. “I’m fine! I’m more than capable of—”

“No, you’re not,” Jack cut her off. “You just fainted. You’re exhausted, distracted—”

“I’ve been busy, is all,” she protested. “With research. You know how it is.”

So what if she’d had a little dizzy spell? She had been standing for a long time and her blood pressure had got a little too low. It could happen to anyone. It was no reason to take her off the team, not when she had spent hours reviewing the mission plan.

“You can’t—”

“My decision is final,” Jack interrupted her. “You’re in no shape to go out there.”

“But—You need me!” She heard how childish it sounded the second the words were out of her mouth, but she didn’t care. It was the truth. “The team needs a medic!”

“The team has a medic.”

That brought her up short. She looked at him, opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“Who?” she asked finally, softly.

“Pinto.”

“Eduardo?” she asked, incredulous. She must have misheard. “They’re not ready. They’re still in training, they—They’re just not ready.”

Jack shook his head slightly and ran a hand over his hair.

“Right now, they’re readier than you are,” he said. “You _fainted_ , Angela. What if it’d happened on the field? What it it’d happened when someone needed you? Huh?”

“That wouldn’t—I wouldn’t—I would never—”

Indignation flooded her. She had _never_ let down her team, _never_ failed to be there for them when they needed her. A muscle twitched in her jaw.

Jack raised his hands. “It happens to the best of us,” he said, trying to be placating. “We all get burnout at some point or other. And hell, you’ve been working yourself to the bone lately. It was only to be expected.”

Angela clenched her fists.

“I told you, I’m _fine_!” she protested again. “I can go,  verdammt nochmal!

“No, you can’t.” Jack said, and now his mouth was set in a hard line. “Right now, you’re a liability on the field.”

Her eyes searched his face, waiting for a sign that something else was coming, or that he didn’t mean it, but he only sighed. When he spoke next, his face had softened slightly.

“Look, don’t beat yourself up about it,” he said. “It’s just a mission. There’ll be more.”

He walked over to the door and turned with a hand already on the handle.

“Just rest, alright?” he said. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

Angela said nothing. She wasn’t sure for how long she sat there after the door closed. Eventually, she got up slowly and walked out of the med-bay, ignoring the building pressure in her chest.

* * *

“Alright, I _am_ worried. Happy?” Moira said, drumming with her fingers on her desk. “Now, can you tell me where she is or not?”

“Certainly, Dr O’Deorain.”

There it was again, that smugness in Athena’s voice. In the back of her mind Moira wondered how Winston had managed to program that into her. Sometimes, the AI seemed almost human.

Maybe she had been programmed with a self-teaching algorithm, Moira thought as Athena’s logo pulsed on the screen. Then a map of the base appeared, a red dot in it.

“Approximate location: level 3, outer terrace.”

As soon as the AI spoke, Moira got up.

“Grand,” she said, right before going out. She didn’t bother shutting down the screen. “Ta, Athena,” she called from the hallway.  

“My pleasure, Dr O’Deorain,” came the answer from the lab.

Moira could have sworn there was a hint of sarcasm in her voice. She snorted softly and made a mental note to spend a little more time studying the AI. If she was capable of sarcasm, chances were they would get along well.

* * *

It was hard to breathe. She was gasping for breath and not sure why it wasn’t reaching her lungs, why it stayed lodged in her throat, making it difficult to swallow.

She let herself sink down to the stone floor, her back against the wall. Distantly, she wondered why she didn’t feel the cold.

She shut her eyes tightly and clenched her fists until her nails left crescent-shaped marks on the palms of her hands. She wished she would draw blood.

Maybe that would stop the sobs.

* * *

It was freezing out on level 3, outer terrace, and for a second Moira wondered if Athena hadn’t sent her there just to mess with her. Then, as she looked around, she noticed the figure, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up and her forehead resting on her arms, shaking slightly.

The second she took a step forward, Ziegler turned her head. Her clear, blue eyes, now rimmed with red, looked up at Moira. She sniffed inelegantly, her chest heaving slightly.

“What are y-you doing here?” Her voice caught in her throat as she hiccupped. “Come to gloat?”

“No. No, I—”

Moira ran a hand through her hair and instantly scolded herself for it. It was a habit she was trying to break; it accomplished nothing other than disrupting her carefully gelled look. But she had to give herself a pass this time, because seeing Ziegler like this really was a wee bit of a shock, as her mother would have said.

Ziegler was bright smiles and well-chosen words and a clear laugh, not— _this_.

For a second, Moira wondered why, exactly, she had thought this would be a good idea. It wasn’t like they were bosom friends. Hell, it wasn’t like they were friends, period. They were colleagues—rivals, really—and their relationship had been strained from the beginning. Try as she might not to show it, Moira knew what Ziegler thought of her.

The silence stretched on, and Ziegler sniffed again.

“Are you just going to stand there?”

She sounded slightly more composed, but not by much.

“I can sit, if you’d rather.”

Even as she said it, Moira let herself slide down next to Ziegler, at a prudent distance. The wall was cold as ice against her back.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Ziegler, without looking at her. “Just—go. Please go away.”

She wiped at her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket and sniffed again, and Moira dug in the inner pocket of her own jacket until she found her handkerchief.

“Here,” she said, tossing it to Ziegler.

Ziegler caught it with a look of surprise. She looked down at the white square of cloth, then at Moira, like she wanted to ask who the hell used a handkerchief in the 21st century, and finally she dried her eyes and blew her nose and then bunched up the handkerchief in an unconscious gesture, like it was a tissue.

“Did you come all the way up here to help me blow my nose?”

Moira snorted. “No,” she said. “I came looking for my escaped patient.”

Ziegler didn’t look up. “I’m not your patient.”

“I beg to differ.”

Moira pulled out a folded piece of paper from the pocket of her jacket and handed it to Ziegler. Her hands were almost steady as her eyes scanned the lines of text quickly.

“Was ist das denn für ein bullshit,” she spat, lowering the sheet of paper. Her eyes snapped to Moira’s. “This isn’t my chart. You made all this up, then put my name at the top.”

“I did not.” Moira sighed. “Look, Ziegler, you’re in a right state, there’s no denying it.”

“Watch me deny it right now.”

“Just hear me out.”

Ziegler raised her head defiantly, and despite the blotchy cheeks and red eyes she looked surprisingly fierce.

“Why should I?”

Moira sighed again. This was not going well at all.

“Because,” she said, “I’m trying to help you.”

“You don’t _help_ people,” Ziegler bit out. “Why would you help me?”

The comment stung. After all, Moira _had_ been making an effort. She had swallowed back all her comments on how Shimada could have been up on his feet in half the time if Ziegler had only been a little less thorough in her testing, for example, and she had made a deliberate effort not to work on _that_ paper, the one that had earned her so much scorn and disgust. All to no avail, apparently.

“Because you need help,” Moira said simply.

She didn’t say anything about any of those other motives that lurked beneath the surface and that had a lot less to do with altruism and a lot more on how every morning Moira had to look in the mirror, point a finger at her reflection and sternly tell herself that she was not in love with Angela Ziegler.

In a way, she supposed, Ziegler would hate that there were any motives other than true altruism. Love—or whatever this _not love_ was called—just wasn’t a good enough reason. For Ziegler, love was secondary, a bonus. She could hate the guts of whoever was on the operating table and still save their life. Hell, she had saved _Moira_ ’s life more than once, and she was certain that her motivation had not been love.

No, Ziegler didn’t act out of love. _Out of duty_ was the best description Moira could think of, even though she had always doubted that such a thing was possible. Kant would have been proud.

“I don’t need any help, and certainly not yours,” Ziegler said.

Moira rolled her eyes, the first sign of annoyance.

“How thick can you get?” she said, perhaps with a little more heat that was called for. “You would have gone charging into battle like bloody Wilhelm—only less than half his size—and what happened in the lab could have happened in the field! If I hadn’t told Morrison—”

“ _You_ told Morrison?” Ziegler’s blue eyes were shards of ice, digging into Moira. “You have no right, _no right_ to meddle in my affairs! I can handle myself just fine, thank you very much, I don’t need you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. I don’t need your help.”

“Of course you don’t,” interrupted Moira. “The great _Mercy_ ,” she put as much scorn as possible into the name, “needs nobody. She’s a force unto her own, the seas open before her, angels descend from the heavens above—”

“Shut up.” Ziegler didn’t raise her voice at all. “Just shut up,” she repeated, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I’ve heard it all before. You just don’t understand.”

“Ah. Of course. We mortals could never pretend to reach such heights of genius.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ziegler repeated, and now there was emphasis, anger maybe, there under the surface. “You can mock me all you want, but you know nothing. Nothing. What I’m working on—” She broke off and smiled, a smile that carried no joy and no happiness, just a hungry anticipation that made Moira think that maybe Kant wouldn’t be so proud after all. “You know nothing.”

“I know some things,” Moira said quietly. “I know that, you keep on like this, your focus shifts.” She paused for a moment, but Ziegler said nothing. “Suddenly, seeing Shimada walk on his own for the first time doesn’t give you so much joy anymore, because you could have done it faster, or better. Next thing you know, seeing McCree play guitar again doesn’t make you feel anything at all, because while you were working on that prosthetic you could have been working on other things. Bigger things, better things, things that will make a _real_ difference.”

“That’s not—That’s something _you_ would think.”

“Yes, it is,” Moira conceded. “I told you, I know some things,” she added, with a small smile. “I wasn’t kicked out of Galway General Hospital for nothing, Ziegler.”

“That’s nothing to be proud of.”

Moira shrugged. “Maybe not,” she said. “Neither is exhausting yourself to the point of becoming unreliable.”

“I’m not unreliable,” Ziegler said softly. “I’ve just been busy. I could have gone out there today. I would have done my job.”

“People could have been hurt,” retorted Moira. She swallowed and licked her lips. “You could have been hurt.”

Ziegler rested her chin on her arms and stared out into the sea.

“I’m not unreliable,” she whispered, even softer than before. “I’m not a liability. I’m not.”

Moira looked at her and was startled to see tears silently sliding down her face. She shifted uneasily, wondering what she could do to comfort her that wouldn’t spook her and that wouldn’t clash with Moira’s own discomfort when physical touch was involved. However, Ziegler solved the problem before she could— _that’s news_ , Moira thought bitterly somewhere in the back of her mind. She wiped at her cheeks, and sniffed twice, and when she spoke, her voice was steady enough.

“You’ve had your fun,” she said, still staring forward. “Will you please go now?”

“I don’t think so, no,” Moira said. “Not unless you come down with me,” she added. “It’s freezing here. Come on, I’ll make tea.”

Ziegler snorted and wiped her face with the dry corner of Moira’s handkerchief.

"You’ll make tea?” she repeated. “Well, that’ll solve all our problems, won’t it?” She laughed mirthlessly. “Why would you even offer that? You don’t even like me.”

Moira couldn’t help raising her eyebrows in a gesture of disbelief. Luckily, Ziegler wasn’t looking.

“As a peace offering, like,” she said. She gestured to the crumpled piece of paper that was Ziegler’s chart. “You’ve seen that. You need to eat properly and you need to rest. Tea is a good way to start.”

“That is the most British thing I have ever heard.”

“Oi, don’t go calling me a Brit. I don’t go around calling you German.”

Ziegler’s smile was minuscule, and she said nothing for a while.

“I have to go back to work,” she said then. “I don’t have time for—”

“You _have got_ to be kidding me,” Moira said. “Did you hear absolutely nothing of what I just said?” She shook her head. “You fainted in the lab. You have to rest. Jaysus, Ziegler, you’re a quick study and it’s not quantum mechanics. It's not so hard to understand, is it?”

But either Ziegler was ignoring her or Moira’s words were just not registering.

“I have to go back, I have to keep going,” she said. She licked her lips. “The sooner this is done, the more lives that will be saved.”

“You’re obsessed. You’ve lost all perspective.”

“I have not!” Ziegler got up suddenly and looked down at Moira. “It’s possible,” she said then. “Even after the heart has stopped, you know, cells still regenerate. With the Caduceus tech—I’ve run experiments. Even after significant damage—a full minute in asystole—” She stopped, still looking down at Moira. “Resurrection,” she whispered then. “It’s possible.”

Moira looked at her. She had a sore in the corner of her mouth, probably from stress. Her hair was tied in a messy ponytail that was coming undone. There were dark rings under her eyes. Her cheeks were still wet from crying. And yet, her eyes shone with an intensity that bordered on frenzy.

If it had been anybody else, Moira would have laughed. Said it was impossible, asked if she really thought she could play god like that. But Ziegler didn’t _think_ , she proved. Even with the tunnel-vision that came from focusing on a single project too long and too intensely, even with the lack of sleep that must feel like a permanent crossfade by that point, if Ziegler said it was possible, Moira could believe it.

In any case, contradicting her would do no good at this point, and neither would a nuanced academic discussion. Her goal was to get Ziegler to calm down, have a cuppa, eat something and go to bed. She had a chance to take care of her; for once, she could be something other than the ruthless, heartless bitch that Ziegler believed her to be, and she wasn’t going to throw away the opportunity.

“Alright,” she said slowly, calmly. “If I can splice human fingers on a lizard, I suppose it’s possible to bring somebody back.” She looked up at Ziegler and extended a hand. “Let’s go down now.”

The silence stretched on for a second, then another, with Ziegler looking down at her as Moira’s fingers began to numb from the cold. Just when she had begun to believe that her peace offering had been definitely and irrevocably rejected, Ziegler grasped her outstretched hand and pulled her up.

They didn’t speak on the way down, but the silence was different than the deliberate stillness of the lab when they worked.

* * *

 The common room was blessedly empty when they arrived, and Angela let herself fall on the couch.

O’Deorain headed for the kitchen, and for a while the sound of her tinkering was the only thing that could be heard. The whole building seemed to be accusing her with its silence. It meant that everybody was busy, being useful, gone to Dorado. Everybody except her.

Some part of her mind noticed that she still trembled slightly with a mix of cold and fury. Fury at herself, for showing weakness, fury for being weak in the first place, fury at O’Deorain for witnessing it. But she was fairly certain that she had already cried herself out, raged herself out against O’Deorain’s stoic façade, she had even told her— _O’Deorain_ , of all people—about Project Freya. And she hadn’t even batted a fucking eyelid. Now she could do nothing but put her legs up on the couch without even bothering to take off her shoes and huddle over herself.

She wasn’t unreliable. She wasn’t a liability. She wasn’t weak, verdammte Scheiße.

Weak people didn’t graduate at nineteen, landed a place at Zürich General immediately after, published a groundbreaking PhD dissertation two months later, became head of surgery three months after that and were offered a place at Overwatch before they were twenty.

She had powered through school, breezed through it, even. She could count the less-than-perfect scores she had got with the fingers of one hand. At university, everything had been _summa cum laude_. In high school, her average had been a perfect six, and everything had been always  ausgezeichnet!

She clenched her fists tightly. She was not weak. People who got _ausgezeichnet!_ on everything could not be weak. But before she could dwell any deeper into the worth of those _summa cum laude_ and the rest of accolades she had won in her life, O’Deorain came back holding two cups of tea.

“Here,” she said, handing one to Angela. “It’s the good kind.”

Angela wrapped her hands over the mug and bent her knees a little more to make room for O’Deorain on the couch. She still wasn’t sure what to think of her, if she could trust her— _a bit late for that, isn’t it, when you’ve told her about the rez tech already_ —but the woman had made her tea, and surely that deserved a spot on the couch.

“The good kind?” she asked after taking the obligatory sip of thanks.

“Hm.” O’Deorain said as she swallowed. “The expensive kind. The kind I hide from Oxton.”

Despite herself, Angela smiled slightly.

“Cheapskate,” she said, though there wasn’t much force behind the jibe at all.

“Yes, well. You grow up in Killinarden, it sort of sticks with you.”

Angela looked at her sideways and said nothing. She had never thought about O’Deorain as having a past, a childhood. She had never even stopped to consider that she could come from a working-class background.

Angela cleared her throat. “Ah. Well, thank you.”

O’Deorain waved it aside. “Next step of your recovery plan, food.”

“I’m not hungry,” Angela said automatically.

The thought of sitting in the mess hall, where everybody could see that she had been pulled off the team and replaced by a trainee, made her sick. She knew people must know already, news travelled faster than fast in Overwatch Headquarters, but she couldn’t bear to go out there and have Lena joke about how she deserved a pay rise, and have Reinhardt clap her on the back and then ask her quietly, much more quietly than anybody suspected Reinhardt of being able to speak, if she was really alright.

O’Deorain looked at her, and for a second Angela was sure she was reading her mind. But, to her surprise, she didn’t insist.

“Well, you should eat at some point,” she said simply. “It helps with the fainting, you know,” she said with a tiny smirk. “Sleep does too.” O’Deorain got up and walked to the door. “And now, I need to smoke.”

* * *

It was dark already when Moira stepped out into the terrace again.

She breathed in deeply and let the freezing air cool her cheeks as she fished in the pocket of her coat for rolling paper and the pack of filters.

She had done all she could.

She had gone looking for Ziegler, she had talked to her, she had made her tea, she had recommended food and sleep.

There was nothing else within her power. If by now Ziegler hadn’t changed her mind about Moira, there was nothing else she could do but keep telling her reflection that she was not carrying a torch for Ziegler every morning as she put on hair gel. Now, every second spent with Ziegler was a second spent oversharing things that nobody had any business knowing. When she had found herself talking about bloody Killinarden, she had decided it was time to retreat and regroup.

She was licking the paper when she heard the door to the terrace open, but she finished rolling and lit the cigarette before looking up, just in time to see Ziegler lean on the banister, next to Moira, and look out to the city below, an expanse of silence and light. A shiver ran through her body, and she drew her jacket tighter around her.

Moira didn’t ask what she was doing there, didn’t say anything as she took off her coat and draped it over Ziegler’s shoulders. She looked up at her and smiled. It struck Moira as a sadder gesture than her earlier tears.

“It’s going to snow,” Ziegler said quietly.

Moira exhaled, her own breath coming out in a white puff and mixing with the smoke.

“How can you tell?”

“It smells like snow,” Ziegler said. “It smells like Zürich before the snow.”

Moira snorted softly. “Sure it does.”

“Laugh all you want,” Ziegler said, smiling slightly. “I grew up here. It’s going to snow. I can tell.”

Moira didn’t answer. They leaned on the banister, side by side, Ziegler with the too-big coat on her, and Moira with her shirt only, feeling the cold like little needles on her arms. The tip of her cigarette glowed red as she inhaled.

“Listen, I—” Ziegler cleared her throat and looked at Moira. Her blue eyes were a lighter shade of pale in the night around her. “I’m sorry for breaking down like that,” she said. “And I wanted to thank you. You know, for trying to help. And for the tea, and the coat now, and everything.”

Moira merely shrugged with one shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” she said, looking down at her own hands for a second.

“And,” Ziegler went on, almost speaking over Moira, “about the resurrection thing—”

“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”

“No, that’s not what I meant. Well, that too, but I was just thinking that if—” She took a deep breath. “If you want to drop by and take a look at it sometime, you’re welcome to. I could use a second opinion.”

Moira looked up at her. Her face was completely honest, open, no hint of mockery. It was the first time Ziegler had offered to let her see any of her projects. It was the first time Ziegler had even hinted that Moira’s opinion could be worth something to her. 

“I—” Moira cleared her throat. “I would like that.”

Ziegler smiled, and Moira thought it was a little less sad this time. Then she shrugged off the coat and handed it back to her.

“Good night, Moira.”

It was the first time Ziegler had used her first name.

Moira watched her go back to the staircase and disappear into the building. As the door to the terrace closed with a soft click, she felt a drop fall on her hand. When she looked up, another landed on her cheek.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered.

She took a last puff from her cigarette, put her coat back on, and leaned on the banister. A small smile softened the thin line of her mouth.

The first snow was falling over the city.

·◊◊◊· 

-fin-

**Author's Note:**

> verdammt nochmal - damn it  
> was ist das denn für ein bullshit - what a load of bullshit  
> verdammte Scheiße - fucking hell  
> ausgezeichnet - excellent
> 
> Thanks so much for this great prompt! It was super fun to write, and I hope it was also fun to read :)


End file.
